Edgar Degas (1834–1917) was born into a banking family, always knew he wanted to be a painter and was fortunate enough to be encouraged in his enthusiasm by his parents. After a classical training he began to paint portraits and history subjects, before seeing the relevance of real life and developing ways in which to depict it.
Influenced by Manet and allied to the Impressionists, he was nevertheless not a committed member of the group and was impatient at its definition of painting. He remained classical in his approach to picture-making but fused this with a keen interest in colour and texture, and an awareness of how photography and Japanese prints had influenced ideas of space and vision. This exhibition aims to show how one of his great themes — the ballet — looks when placed in the context of parallel developments in photography and early film.
Degas was an artist deeply interested in photography as an adjunct to and tool of contemporary life. He used its language in his paintings and drawings (famously in the unconventional cropping of images), he even took photos himself, but the crucial thing to remember is that his own work as a painter and sculptor utterly transcended photography. There is no question of equality here, though this exhibition might seem to suggest it. To my mind, there is rather too much emphasis on photography, which is used to pad out what might otherwise seem rather a slim display of some 80 paintings, sculptures, pastels and drawings, spread out through the RA’s first-floor galleries.
This exhibition is, in some ways, an excuse to put together a group of paintings, drawings and sculptures which have long been popular with a wide public, under the guise of doing something new. Ballet pictures pull in the crowds — so what we have here is a tried-and-tested formula tricked out with a few more photos than usual. It is not a figure and landscape show, for instance, which might have been altogether less predictable. Never mind, the show still brings together some marvellous work that amply repays close attention. A Degas show of such quality is always worth seeing.
Entering through the central hall to a dramatic triple silhouette of a pirouetting dancer, the main point of the exhibition is at once elegantly made: movement. The walls of the main gallery are rebuilt on an oval to reduce the space, while paintings are hung sparely. Will this relative lack of exhibits encourage visitors to look more closely at what is here? Let’s hope so. The first painting, for example, is ‘The Rehearsal’ (c.1874) from Glasgow, in which the dancer at centre back makes an extraordinarily long arm, reaching across the windows like a bough. Another version of the same subject, from Harvard, is much calmer, but in both the principal feature is the space of the room and how Degas evokes it, rather than the dancers. The figures are there, in one sense, simply to articulate the space. Limbs are to carry direction three-dimensionally, as can be seen in the pointing leg at extreme right of the beautiful pastel entitled ‘The Ballet Rehearsal’. Elsewhere, arms reach out like birds in flight (the Courtauld’s ‘Two Dancers on the Stage’), or a figure sinks into the greenery of the mise en scène (‘Dancer on Pointe’).
One of the great pleasures of this exhibition is the inclusion of so many beautiful drawings; for instance, the way the celebrated ‘Little Dancer’ bronze (from the Tate) in room 2 is surrounded by exquisite charcoal, pastel and chalk studies. Degas’s distinctive clarity of line owes much to Ingres, but it also shows him in fruitful dialogue with other masters of the past, such as Mantegna or Watteau, whose work he knew intimately. He was a committed collector of gesture and pose and not above recycling motifs that particularly appealed to him. Everywhere, the firm grasp of his powerful pictorial intelligence is visible, and his understanding of form under light.
By nature solitary and shy, Degas developed a brusque manner and sharp tongue (Sickert described his ‘rollicking and somewhat bear-like sense of fun’) as a mask with which to face the world. He was so little obsessed with himself that he stopped making self-portraits at the age of 31, and concentrated his attention on other people. He said he wanted to look at his subjects through the keyhole, so that they would remain oblivious of his presence and continue naturally in their activities. The dancers, for instance, should be as absorbed in the challenge of their professional tasks as he himself was in his. He did not want them acting up for him or feeling constrained, and his own sense of self was so little in need of bolstering (unlike most artists) that he was happy to remain invisible.
This self-effacement chimes with his supreme objectivity as an artist, and accounts for what has often been criticised as his coldness. He was called a misogynist because there is none of the expected sensuality in his depictions of girls, but this is unfair. Degas ushered reality into the domain of the idealised nude, courting the awkward and even the ugly in his pursuit of truth to observation. In the last years, with failing eyesight, he worked more from memory and invention and the paintings rather fall off (‘Dancer with Bouquets’, 1890–1900, is pretty dreadful), though the pastels keep standards up. (‘Three Dancers, Blue Skirts, Red Bodices’, c.1903, is a marvel of intense colour and texture.) Form becomes arabesque, as in the superb charcoal ‘Group of Dancers’, c.1905–10, and in the marvellous series of Russian Dancers. All is flow and rhythm, and we are further from photography than ever.
Although it’s both interesting and instructive to be shown Degas’s own photos, there is far too much photography in this exhibition. Muybridge has been given more than his fair share of attention recently, with a whole exhibition devoted to his work at the Tate, and substantial representation in the Estorick’s show On the Move last year. We don’t need another room of his very familiar images here. I suppose photographs serve as a useful point of contrast, as when a beautiful charcoal nude drawing from the Fitzwilliam appears in their midst. And I always enjoy seeing Loïe Fuller beating up a storm of skirts. But I think photography is employed here as a way of explaining Degas, and thus of diminishing the mystery of his genius. In the final gallery is a glimpse of the old artist caught on film by Sacha Guitry — fascinating to us, but a final insult to a man who didn’t want to be filmed, and who had, until then, successfully guarded his privacy.
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